From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@lorrey.com)
Date: Mon May 24 1999 - 16:27:24 MDT
den Otter wrote:
> ----------
> > From: Michael S. Lorrey <mike@lorrey.com>
>
> > If you exclude crimes which are lesser or are not offenses in other countries we'd
> have a far more comparative level of imprisonment. Additionally China has a higher
> fraction in prison, if you include 're-education camps' as prisons. I find it
> interesting that the three most powerful nations have the highest prison
> populations....
> >
> > On the other hand, since most crime here is commited by criminals on other
> criminals, I can't say that you could call all of our prisoners 'oppressed'.
>
> And what about the war on drugs, which in a rational world would
> duly be classified as a crime against humanity?
I agree with you here.
> Apart from that, your
> prison system (and in fact just about all the prison systems of the
> so-called "civilized" nations) are simply barbaric. Little better than
> concentration camps, really.
Well, we tried going the route that european prisons are: pretty much forced vocational education and psych treatment. Problem was, the recidivism stats showed that it was a failure here. Here, the stats seem to bear out that if you make prison life as unbearable as possible, a crook is far less likely to want to go back to such an institution, so they took out the weight lifting equipment (reduces guard costs, esp. medical bills) they are taking out the college courses, etc. except at the minimum security resorts.
Mike Lorrey
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